The Glamour of Grammar

A one day workshop: Thursday July 8th 2010

Grammar is seen by some as a set of dreary rules, by others as
hoops to jump through on the way to assessing pupils’ progress
in English and by many others as something that is joyless and difficult.
We hope to show you that while describing it as “glamorous”
might be pushing it a bit, grammar can open up different ways of
thinking about language, give you new approaches to teaching and
equip your students with analytical and problem-solving tools that
can help in all sorts of ways.

The day is designed to offer teachers of key stages 3-5:

sessions which will consolidate your own knowledge of grammar

resources that can be used with classes from year 9 to A level

ideas and practical approaches to teaching spoken language

examples of investigative approaches to language study

illustrations of actual language usage, drawn from the ICE-GB
corpus

Who. The day's sessions will be presented by:

Bas Aarts, Professor of English Linguistics and Director
of the Survey of English Usage (SEU) at UCL

Barbara Bleiman, Deputy Director of The English & Media Centre
and editor of emag

Sean Wallis, Senior Research Fellow SEU

Dan Clayton, Research Fellow SEU, AQA senior examiner for
English Language A level

Where. Department of English Language and Literature,
University College London (5 minutes' walk from British Rail,
Euston)

When. Thursday 8th July 10.00 - 4.15

The cost for each delegate is £49

Timetable

Time

Session

10.00 - 10.15

Registration & coffee

10.15 - 11.45

An introduction to studying grammar: philosophy & practice.
A session designed to explain why studying grammar is an important
way of developing problem-solving skills, plus a refresher course
in the basics of grammar to give a confidence boost to secondary
and sixth form English teachers

Bas Aarts

11.45 - 11.50

Brief break

11.50 - 1.00

Practical approaches to grammar teaching from KS3 - A level.
A resource-based session with tasks aimed at three different
levels.

Dan Clayton

1.00 - 2.00

Lunch

2.00 - 3.00

The Spoken Language Study:
an introduction to teaching approaches for the new GCSE unit

Barbara Bleiman

3.00 - 3.15

Coffee break

3.15 - 4.15

Encouraging Investigation:
a session designed to set up mini-investigation tasks using
the ICE-GB corpus and other resources, from GCSE - A level

This is the first of what we hope will be a series of workshops
for teachers, addressing grammar teaching in secondary English.
If you have any suggestions for particular areas that you would
like to see covered in future workshops, please let us know.